The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

Friday, six in the morning

I made a list on the back of a feed store receipt. Every farm in the township that I knew still put up small square bales.

It is a shorter list than it used to be. Most people have gone to big rounds.

Then I started calling at quarter to six, because farm people are up and anyone who is not up does not answer anyway.

The first neighbor came up our lane at six. It was Bill Hanson, Julie’s husband, with forty bales on a trailer and a thermos of coffee he handed me without a word.

By eight there were four more. By noon there had been nine different families up that lane, and some of them came twice. Nobody asked what had happened. Everybody already knew.

The straw came from everywhere. Some of it was bright and new, baled that July off oat ground.

Some of it had sat in the back of somebody’s haymow for three years and came off the trailer in a cloud of dust.

Nobody cared. A wall is a wall. The Mertens brought sixty bales from their heifer barn. A man I had only ever seen at the feed mill brought twenty and said his granddaughter had a ticket.

I took the day off from the clinic. My boss, who has been a large animal vet for thirty years and does not waste words, said, “Go build your maze,” and hung up on me.

Leonard’s bales

About ten in the morning, a little flatbed wagon came up the lane behind a tractor older than I was. Leonard Kowalski was driving it. He was eighty-six and lived alone on the corner of the county road.

He had forty bales on that wagon, stacked so square you could have set a level on them. He would not let me lift one.

He sat on the edge of the wagon deck and counted them off while two of the high school boys carried them out.

When the last one was down he stayed sitting there. He looked at the bales lined up in the stubble for a long time.

“My wife and I put those up,” he said. “The last summer she was well. I couldn’t bring myself to feed them out or sell them. Just kept them in the barn.”

I did not know what to say. I said, “Leonard, you didn’t have to bring those.”

“I was saving them for something that mattered.” He patted the wagon deck once. “She taught Sunday school for forty years. She’d want them under a bunch of kids.”

I said thank you. Then I walked out into the standing corn about ten rows, where nobody could see me, and stood there for a minute with my hand over my mouth.

When I came back out, Leonard was still sitting on his wagon, watching the boys work, and he did not say a word about my face.

That is how men his age are kind to you. They let you have your face.